Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Vĩnh Biệt, Các Gangster

Rate this book
Vĩnh biệt, các Gangster là dung dịch chảy ra từ sự nghiền trộn không câu nệ giữa kinh điển và bình dân, giữa mực thước và sa đọa, giữa man rợ và tiến hóa, giữa tưởng tượng và khách quan. Bởi thế mới có chuyện người ta đem tên cha mẹ đặt chất lên xe tải đổ xuống sông, rồi lao vào cuộc chiến đẫm máu với tên mới để giành nó về dùng. Bởi thế trường thơ mới tọa lạc ở tầng hầm của một tòa nhà, bên cạnh có ma cà rồng, bên trên có hộp đêm, nhà thổ, dòng sông, một bệnh viện không giống bệnh viện, và hai trường phổ thông không hề phổ thông. Bởi thế mới có mèo chuộng Thomas Mann và giải trí bằng Aristotle, mới có cái tủ lạnh biết nói thật ra là hóa thân của các cổ đại triết gia…

Vĩnh biệt, các Gangster còn là một khám phá về hình thức biểu hiện, với văn xuôi được bày biện bằng thơ, bằng sơ đồ, bằng tranh, bằng cách thổi giai điệu vào kích cỡ của từng chương sách. Bởi vậy mà việc đọc nó…. khơi ra rất nhiều quái cảm.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

28 people are currently reading
3450 people want to read

About the author

Genichiro Takahashi

10 books34 followers
Takahashi was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima prefecture and attended the Economics Department of Yokohama National University without graduating. As a radical student, he was arrested and spent half a year in prison, which caused Takahashi to develop a form of aphasia. As part of his rehabilitation, his doctors encouraged him to start writing. Since April 2005, he has been a professor at the International Department of Meiji Gakuin University. Takahashi's current wife, Tanikawa Naoko and former wife Murai Yuzuki were also both writers.

Takahashi's first novel, Sayonara, Gyangutachi (Sayonara, Gangsters), was published in 1982, and won the Gunzo Literary Award for First Novels. It has been acclaimed by Critics as one of the most important works of postwar Japanese literature. It has been translated into English by Vertical, Inc., Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.

In addition, his Yuga de kansho-teki na Nippon-yakyuu ("Japanese Baseball: Elegant and Sentimental") won the Mishima Yukio Prize in 1988, and his Nihon bungaku seisui shi (The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature) received the Itoh Sei Literature Award.

In 2012, Sayonara Christopher Robin ("Goodbye, Christopher Robin") won the Tanizaki Prize.

He is also a noted essayist, covering a diverse field of topics ranging from literary criticism to horse-racing.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
306 (28%)
4 stars
383 (35%)
3 stars
241 (22%)
2 stars
101 (9%)
1 star
42 (3%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 186 reviews
Profile Image for TK421.
588 reviews287 followers
March 4, 2013
Sometimes writers like to experiment with form or style or storytelling, which is fine by me as long as the story itself isn't sacrificed in the process. Takahashi goes one step further; it's almost as if he is not only experimenting with the writing style, but also with how a person will read his novel. I wish I could give a better description of what I mean.

Within the pages of this novel you will find heartache, murder, hilarity, the absurd, Virgil the refridgerator, a cat who likes Thomas Mann, poets, a bleak world, and even moments of redemption. A sad love story, a revenge thriller, and a poetic treatise on the subject of being alive, this novel gives more to the reader than normal tales, but at the same time limits understanding.

Does it all work? No. But, trust me, take a look at this title.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Profile Image for Veronika Sebechlebská.
381 reviews139 followers
March 9, 2021
Zážitok z čítania by som opísala asi takto: vezmete Viana, nariedite Murakamim (to je jedno ktorým), pridáte vodku, dozdobíte olivou, podáte frustrovanej chladničke, ktorá sa necháva oslovovať Vergílius, pre priateľov Maro, a šľahnete si ďalšiu lajnu. Okolo vás potichu prejde mačka.
Profile Image for Kyle Muntz.
Author 7 books120 followers
October 11, 2015
I've said a lot of good things about this book, but after reading it for the third time (even accounting for the huge change in my tastes over the last few years), I'm pleasantly surprised to find it lives up to all of them. Sayonara Gtrangers is deeply strange, formally conscious and smart, but also compulsively readable, endlessly funny, and held together by a strong sense of human tragedy. There are too many good parts to list, but "The Fat Gangster's" speach and everything involving Caraway, Henry the 4th, and Song Book are a good place to start. Reading this book about six years ago had a big effect on how I view literature, experimental fiction, and the virtues of writing simply even if your subject is endlessly strange or complex--and also, though I'm not sure how useful comments like this are, it was one of main formal influence behind two novels of mine. I'm so glad to have gone back, though I still think it's a shame no more of Takahashi's writing has been translated, since there's so much of it and it all seems so interesting.
Profile Image for melissabastaleggere.
160 reviews658 followers
November 3, 2022
Come si può anche solo pensare di recensire un libro in cui Virgilio si trasforma in un frigorifero?
Profile Image for Quân Khuê.
365 reviews881 followers
March 2, 2014
Hệ thống sao của Goodreads có vẻ vô nghĩa với cuốn này, vì nó không giống bất kỳ cái gì ta đã đọc trước đây cho nên thích hay không thích đều không nghĩa lý. Ba sao cho những băn khoăn.
Profile Image for Stephen Rowland.
1,357 reviews67 followers
July 31, 2018
Here's one of the strangest books I've ever read and while the other reviews are loaded with names like Brautigan and Borges and words like "postmodern" all I can say is SORRY NERDS I NEVER WENT TO COLLEGE. My uneducated mind could only come up with Philip K. Dick (at his wildest) forced into the structure of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's "A Fool's Life." Like that anti-story-cum-suicide-note, "Sayonara, Gangsters," though a novel, is told in a series of rapid-fire, episodic vignettes, which I think was very smart in this case. With a more conventional structure, this book's weirdness would probably have been less charming and more tiresome. I will be the first to say that I DO NOT TEND TO LIKE BOOKS LIKE THIS, but the cats reading and refrigerators talking and the rivers running through the top stories of buildings which also house bars with winged, flying staff members; the homicidal newscasters, the postcards this city's (?) inhabitants receive on the day they will die, the names that literally kill people, the gigantic Ferris Wheel that commits suicide, the vampire who lives next in a windowless, door-less room next to the poetry school, and of course the gangsters -- the archetypal gangsters who cannot die -- all struck me as undeniably creative and amusing. I laughed out loud reading this thing many times. Author Takahashi attended but never graduated from Tokyo University because he was arrested as a "student radical" and spent half a year in prison, an experience that was so traumatic for him (I don't know why) that he became incapable of reading and writing for several years. I'd like to see what else he can do and hope we get another translation of one of his novels in the near future.
1 review
May 2, 2012
This is unlike anything I've ever read, and it was influential and amazing because of it. To put it in perspective, when writing this novel, Takahasi was struggling to regain his understanding of language after a traumatic experience in prison. This resonates throughout the novel, which feels chaotic and eccentric, all because it is from the perspective of an intelligent and learned individual who is just learning the meaning of "truth," perspective, and the complexities of reality. I by no means understand the majority of this book, but each time I look through it I find something new and incredibly interesting, which is what makes this so great to me. There are countless elements to be found in this, and I highly recommend it if you have an interest in Philosophy and Psychology. Also, if you didn't like it or feel you didn't understand it at all, I'd say to give it another shot and to try and make sense of something within it.
Profile Image for Jonathan Lee B..
389 reviews8 followers
August 26, 2012
Sayonara, Gangsters is a Richard Brautigan book if Richard Brautigan was still alive and Japanese.
Profile Image for irene.
60 reviews4 followers
April 24, 2021
Sayonara Gangsters è il libro che dà inizio alla scrittura postmoderna in giappone. È la prima opera del suo autore, che lo scrisse in seguito a un lungo periodo passato in prigione.
Abbiamo davanti mondo dove le persone non hanno un nome se non quelli che due amanti si assegnano l’un l’altro, in cui i gatti amano leggere i classici e i frigoriferi che sono anche Virgilio sono capaci di parlare, dei gangster continuano a uccidere i nuovi presidenti degli USA minuti dopo la loro elezione, e le assurdità non si fermano qui ma continuano all’infinito.
Quella che abbiamo davanti è un’opera che fa della sperimentazione il proprio cavallo di battaglia. Stile e trama vanno ad allinearsi e fondersi nella costruzione di un mondo tanto sottile quanto assurdamente sensato nella propria logica.
La storia è formata da sequenze rapide, capitoli brevi, una serie di “vignette” quasi, separate tra di loro in modo netto ma tutte collegate al nostro protagonista, il cui nome è proprio “Sayonara, Gangsters”. Vediamo delle fette della sua vita, infatti, dalla storia d’amore con Song Book alle sue lezioni in una scuola di poesia.
Spesso libri così sono difficili da leggere, ma qui succede qualcosa di diverso. Ciò che leggiamo è intriso di emotività e sentimento. Non è postmoderno nel senso di “talmente sperimentale da risultare vuoto e asciutto”. Ci troviamo davanti a tragedia e dolcezza lungo tutte le assurde pagine, una poesia da universo parallelo, temi di amore e solitudine e memoria si accompagnano in una strana mistura con tutto il resto di ciò che compone il romanzo.
Profile Image for Karmologyclinic.
249 reviews36 followers
December 4, 2016
To talk about this book is to put meta- and post- before each thing you'd like to say about it.
It's experimental in all the ways possible. Often such experimental books tend to be difficult to read, understand or feel. Takahashi makes it so important in his writing of his book, that you thoroughly enjoy the process of reading it. Maybe because he himself was struggling at the point with expressing through language.
It is a big lesson at how postmodernism can work along with simplicity. A bigger and more important lesson at how postmodernism, often dry and self-absorbed, can work with feelings. Oh, the feelings of reading this book! Some stories are pure poetry, the story about the lost man phoning the teenager and asking her where is he, for example. It was so pretty and I must have read it more than 5 times to enjoy it. The symbolism in the book reminds me of zen spirituality and meditation. It feels like it has a flow, it's not forced, it's simple, yet so, so, so very nice, very nice, very nice and poetic.
Like if you had a poetry school and the room next to your class, a room without entrance or exit doors, was home to vampires. Like, there is Virgil, the roman poet who had justifiably become Virgil the refrigerator. Like, there are people choosing their names and choosing names for each other too. And if you are to die, you know that beforehand.
The author elaborates on the themes of identity, memories, love, loneliness. Where he is at his strongest point is when he encounters the theme of death, it is a filigree theme wrapped around the whole narrative, from the early Caraway story to Henry V at the end.
You have to read this book to know what it is about. It's indescribable but if the book had one question that it could answer, it would be 'what is poetry anyway'?
And if that doesn't convince you, there is an alcoholic cat that loves its milk and vodka.
Profile Image for Luke.
1,604 reviews1,168 followers
December 23, 2020
I've read some weird stuff in my lifetime. While I don't gravitate towards it much these days, I have enough faith in my continually honed reading comprehension, if not my greater knowledge of history outside the pale, to be able to get through something densely referential with some minimum amount of appreciation. This particular work was just...well. Perhaps reading this was why, in a recent review, I commented on how certain demographics can stuff all sorts of violently sordid incomprehensibility and come out with a praised "subversive" label while others tackle more banal, less than hygienic topics and be classified as "cringe" or along some other line of presumptuous dismissiveness. It's not as if there isn't a talking cat or a Latin poet turned refrigerator, but there was also a lot of, oh, the bad guys are just in it for the look, as well as the women are just in it to be stuffed into various refrigerators/closets/traumas. By the time the protagonist was engaged in sexually fetishizing a junior high girl obsessed with her history of incestuous abuse, I was done looking for a reason for justifying all of this. So the author namedrops Rilke and Mann and enough others to apparently merit a 'Works Cited' page in the back of this edition. That doesn't tie together the cheap shots at pathos via deaths of small children/cats with the maybe sorta kinda commentary on mechanized police states in any satisfactory way. I'm probably missing a great deal of the context, but in that direction lies the never-ending cycle of subjectivity, and I'm personally a big fan of cutting that off and leaving that sort of work for someone who knows more than I do.

This work is supposedly about a literary type getting too comfortable with extremist politics and then having to live out the consequences. After years of watching such run wreckage all over my country while liberals hand-wring and consider looting to be the equivalent of murder, I'm really not in the mood to see Japan's kinds of extremists, especially the right-wing ones that this work's 'gangsters' evoke, be characterized as a bunch of buffoons. I suppose the end poetry workshop sequence was supposed to reflect a certain sort of humanizing that could rescue certain types who otherwise would naturally be drawn to such movements? There's also the whole government run scheduling of deaths thing, and the self violence, the riffs on Ovid and other ancient "Western" writers, and the comparing of poetry to terrorism, as well as the oddly poignant idea of lovers naming each other and the slightly menacing one of the mechanized working landscape, but it'd all just collapse as soon there was another female body being put on violent/obscene display just cause. Another mark of extremist politics? Okay, so maybe it's worth a mention in the book description, or perhaps in some of the top reviews so someone like me knows what they're getting into? No? Well, you can't exactly blame me then for expecting the quirky without a bunch of the usual gendered nonsense and being severely disappointed with the actual material.

Next week begins the new year. This was probably the most ill fit of works for me to read during this period, but it's better than having it hang around any longer. I'm sure that, some day, I'll run into some kind of in-depth commentary on this work and/or the author than I can garner from Wikipedia (it's amazing how the author acquires five wives if you go beyond the Anglo version of things), and I'll save my moment of increased understanding till then. For now, I'd rather put something out there that's a bit less effusive than the expressions of praise that first led me to acquire this work to begin with. Perhaps I've simply completely lost the faculty to enjoy things for enjoyment's sake, but it gets a little old when said expressions of such fall along the same lines of grotesquerie that is neither rightfully shocking nor even slightly humorous. Translation, translation, translation, but I've read too many Japanese works derived from too many genres to start thinking I'm simply just not up to stuff. So, if you have more of a head for these kinds of "subversive" things that have a high risk of coming off as slipshod schlock, you might get something out of this. Otherwise, save yourself the trouble.
Profile Image for Frank Peter.
186 reviews16 followers
July 23, 2017
Awful.

People who want to become artists but find they have no talent for it always tend to flee into weirdness for the sake of weirdness, betting on the public reaction: 'It's incomprehensible, it must be profound!' ...

Good bet, bad book.
Profile Image for Chậu Tưởng Kí.
85 reviews29 followers
January 2, 2016
Kì cục kẹo hết sức :v Mình thích bài thơ đầu tiên, đoạn các gangster chết, và tất cả các trang ít chữ nối liền nhau.
Profile Image for B.
133 reviews166 followers
February 3, 2016
Rất khác người, rất kỳ quái, rất hóm hỉnh. Và rất duyên..
Profile Image for Rosie Nguyễn.
Author 8 books6,415 followers
May 11, 2017
Đây là một cuốn truyện rất khó nhận xét. Vì chẳng biết nó viết về cái gì.. Đọc nó trong một buổi. Chứng tỏ nó rất cuốn hút. Hài hước là điều chắc chắn. Và quái dị. Và điên rồ. Nhiều đoạn đọc mà cười sằng sặc rồi rú lên: cha nội tác giả này bị điên. Điên sao mà được giải thưởng văn học danh giá nhất nước Nhật thì mình cũng muốn bị điên kiểu vậy.
Profile Image for Xiao Fang.
17 reviews8 followers
March 16, 2016
Một cuốn sách không phải để hiểu. Có cố mấy cũng không hiểu đâu, đừng cố.

Nhưng tôi thích cái sự khó hiểu của nó. 5* vì đọc không hiểu gì nhưng lại không ngưng được. Cũng có lúc tưởng như hiểu rồi, lật trang sau, lại mù mờ như cũ. Túm lại trong một chữ: QUÁI!

Tuy không hiểu nhưng vẫn cảm được. Cái kiểu nhức nhối với xã hội, cái kiểu khép kín trong suy nghĩ, cái kiểu triết lý tưng tửng nhưng lại rất hợp lý. Cái gọi là lớp học y như nhà tù, nhà tù thì nghe như trại tâm thần.
Hẳn đây là thế giới nội tâm của tác giả. Biết là được, không cần bạn hiểu đâu.

Không biết sau khi viết xong cuốn sách này tác giả đã khỏi bệnh chưa nhỉ? Hay chuyển sang một bệnh khác?

Khi đang đọc đến mấy trang cuối, em gái hỏi: "Cuốn này nói về gì á?"
Tôi chỉ có thể nói: "Sách của một bệnh nhân viết trong quá trình điều trị tâm lí."
"Bà đọc gần hết mà không biết nội dung à? Thế sao bà mua?"
"Bìa nó đẹp."
Profile Image for Il lettore sul trespolo.
218 reviews8 followers
August 7, 2025
È il primo libro giapponese che abbia veramente amato.
Ha quel non so che di surreale alla "La schiuma dei giorni" di Boris Vian ma molto molto più folle e nonsense.
Bellissimo.

Si, Luca del passato, avevi ragione, ma alla seconda lettura mi sento di dire un'altra cosa: questo è veramente un libro clamoroso, un capolavoro sotto tutti gli aspetti.
Forse il più bel libro postmoderno di sempre.
Wow.
Profile Image for NhaThuyen.
17 reviews23 followers
March 4, 2014
Quá lâu rồi tôi mới đọc một mạch một cuốn tiểu thuyết. Lí do? Để đỡ hại não, tôi chỉ đọc những cái gì ngắn.

Và thơ.

Đọc xong cuốn sách, tôi đã nghĩ, giá mà nó thử thách hơn nữa, khó hơn nữa, xáo trộn hơn nữa, quên nhớ hơn nữa, thơ ca hơn nữa.
Profile Image for Edward Rathke.
Author 10 books149 followers
April 29, 2015
Oh, this is the kind of book I like. It's funny, it's chaotic, it's smart.

I guess I don't have a lot to say about it. It's a very western feeling novel, but with enough japanese oddness to keep it fresh and interesting.

Yes, definitely recommend, if only so you can enjoy a pretty wild ride.
Profile Image for Zuzana Be.
445 reviews25 followers
January 16, 2022
Toto bolo na mňa asi príliš experimentálne. Teda nemám nič proti experimentálnej literatúre, ale nejak nemusím zbytočné presexualizovanie, ktoré podľa mňa ani nedáva zmysel, len tam je, aby ja neviem, šokovalo? (kniha je pôvodne z 1982)
Celé je to úplne magický/scifi/neviemčo CHAOS, ale rýchlo sa číta s mega krátkymi kapitolkami. Páčil sa mi doslov od Igora Cimu, kde vysvetlil súvislosti s Takahashim a dobou, kedy bola kniha napísaná. Veronika Sebechlebská to zhrnula na výbornú, ale ostávam radšej pri Murakamim.. :)
Profile Image for Thomas Hale.
943 reviews31 followers
June 28, 2022
I've no idea who recommended this to me or why - it's been on my to-read list for many years. But I finally read it and damn, I loved it. A novel half-told in comedy skits, a postmodern exploration of the power and failures of language and names, of companionship and love and education. It's very strange and silly in an endearing way, but when tragedy happens it can be absolutely heartbreaking. Is it political? Kind of? Someone more knowledgeable than me could certainly situate it within the swelling Japanese bubble economy and the neoliberal drive complicating and destroying traditional ideas of identity and purpose. But I mostly just enjoyed the ride, the breezy pace and absurdist humour.
Profile Image for Federica.
89 reviews43 followers
August 5, 2021
Super contenta di essere riuscita a mettere le mani su questo libro introvabile, con diversi scambi interbibliotecari ci sono riuscita a leggere questa perla rara della letteratura. Questa storia esce da tutti gli schemi e le regole di comprensione e scrittura, c'è una trama-non-trama che non ci capisci niente e stai peggio di prima ma è bello capire e accorgersi che nel mondo ci sono persone che pensano fuori dagli schemi e che riescono a concepire roba del genere.
Profile Image for Ƙʏᴙᴀ.
214 reviews12 followers
October 11, 2019
Non esistono parole per descriverlo, è il libro più assurdo che abbia mai letto, e che probabilmente leggerò mai.
A tratti mi ha divertita, a tratti mi ha commossa e per tutto il tempo mi ha fatto gridare GENIALE!

Peccato sia quasi introvabile.
24 reviews5 followers
November 8, 2020
Un libro folle e onirico, direi quasi disorientante. Si compone di una serie di immagini allegoriche che lasciano nella mente una strana sensazione di incompiuto. Diverso sicuramente da qualsiasi altro libro abbiate mai letto nella vostra vita, perché è un libro unico.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 186 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.